The US Engagement in the Middle East,

Past, Present and . . . ?

by Steven Simon

18 April 2019, 6:00 pm

Merten Hall, 1202

George Mason University

Steven Simonis John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of History at Amherst College. From 2014-2016 he was a visiting Dickey Center Fellow and lecturer in Government at Dartmouth College. Prior to this, he was Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies - US and Middle East, resident in Bahrain. From early 2011 through the end of 2012 he served on the National Security Council staff at the Obama White House, where he was the senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. Previously he served for six years at the Clinton White House as director for global issues and senior director for transnational threats on the National Security Council staff. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia. These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State.

He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror (Random House, 2004), winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations; The Next Attack (Henry Holt, 2006), one of the “best books of the year” in the Washington Post and Financial Times; Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of RegimeChange (Oxford, 2003); Building a Successful Palestinian State and The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State(RAND 2005); The Sixth Crisis (Oxford, 2010); The Pragmatic Superpower: The United States and the Middle East in the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2016); Our Separate Ways (Public Affairs, 2016); and The Long Goodbye: The United States and the Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring (Penguin/ Random House, forthcoming).